Looking back at some of the less-than-insightful things I wrote over the years on this message board, I was shocked to realize that I actually saw Lucrecia Martel's _The Holy Girl_! I remembered absolutely nothing about it; not an image, a character, a story fragment remain of it. (I do remember the super close-up shticks in _La Cienaga_.) Fast forward 15 years and she has released _Zama_, still made with the static camera/no music mantra decreed by critics and
festival curators in the early 2000s. What a pretentious artifice; the actors would almost move outside the frame and have to bounce back, like a low-tech dot
in an Atari video game. In fact, _Zama_ is just as badly dated as Atari.
What point is made by constantly calling attention to its own artificiality? Except to mollify the critics who went insane for formalistic cinema. Well those critics have moved on to other fashions. (Once in a while the camera
is allowed to move, and in the old days the art-house crowd would have swooned about such trifles.) The story is supposedly about a colonial official's interaction with the locals in South America; it is hardly well-served by the rigid cinematic dogma. I lasted all of 30 minutes.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------- _Cold War_ may be shot in highly stylized black-and-white, but the story is
so urgent and imbued with such an air of inevitability, if Pawel Pawlikowski did not direct it, the film would have had found a way to make itself. Which is not to slight the brilliant effort by Pawlikowski, inspired by the true story of his star-crossed, Berlin-Wall-crossing parents. The film is a melodrama in the best sense; from the first frame to the end credits it is filled with songs -- folk, jazz, classical, and hybrid of all genres. The ballads take on the role of narration (there is little dialog) and elevate
the generation-spanning, emotionally drenched epic. (In lesser hands the
film could have been kitchen-sink-tawdry, or merely miserabilist.)

Wiktor (Tomsatz Kot) is a talented pianist/composer commissioned to assemble
a troupe of folk dancer/musicians to serenade communistic party elites in post-war Poland. He is tall, handsome, and sophisticated, a fish out of
water among his rural apprentices. Except for the spirited Zula (Joanna Kulig); the buxom blonde not only can huff ballads like a lounge lizard;
she comes with impressive femme fatale pedigree, is rumored to have killed
her own father. Wiktor's colleagues call her a con-artist but soon he
is a moth to her flame. The troupe is a big success, touring other
Soviet bloc countries. He asks her to elope in Berlin, but is left
waiting at the Berlin Wall in vain. In the next few years he scraps
together a living in Paris, playing in lounges, writing film scores. His
aloof elegance and easy affairs with the ladies fit that world like a glove, but he cannot resist trying to reach Zula in Yuglovslavia, which almost
gets him kidnapped behind the Iron Curtain. Then one day Zula bursts
into his recording studio, announces she has married an Italian just to
be near him.

Joanna Kulig was trained as a classical vocalist. She reminds me of Irene Jacob, who came out of a conservatory herself 30 years ago to stun the cinematic universe with dual singer roles in _The Double Life of Veronique_. Kulig's Zula is tough and street-wise while Weronika is pure and idealistic. Unlike Kieslowski's _Double Life_, which pines for mystical reconciliation between East and West, _Cold War_ coolly laments the worst of both worlds. Poland is a bureacratic hell with stifling state-control, while Paris is a cannabalistic capitalist cesspol. Zula's soul-stirring folk songs about love and youth are commodified into a jazzy album with French lyrics that hollow them out. Wiktor is an empty shell of himself too, a smooth operator who
might even have pimped Zula to his producer-friend to consumate the recording. (Is Wiktor the manipulative puppeteer Alexandre to Veronique's chanteuse?)

Zula sees through his malaise. And here is the great story/character twist worthy of Nicole Garcia's _From the Land of the Moon_. Zula may dress like Marilyn Monroe and dance lasciviously on nightclub tables, seemingly ready
to drop on the lap of the first man who can boost her career, but at heart she is a true-hearted peasant girl. In her own way, she has unshakable faith
and integrity (although the two men she marries might disagree; she would
argue they have not married in a church). Disgusted with Paris and Wiktor's indifference, she ran home to her old troupe. The repentent Wiktor limps back too; the Polish authorities ruin his hands and give him a 15-year sentence. Zula marries another man to free him. Her new husband offers to make an album of their French songs originally transcribed from Polish. The two lovers literally choose death over another such bastardization. They say their
vows in a ruined church in which the film begins.

Kulig is well-known in the West for her supporting roles in _Elles_ and
_The Innocent_. Her anguished work here is multilayered and unforgettable.
I must confess there is little in Pawlikowski's ourvre that has shown thta
he is capable of such a taut, flawless, generous, and ultimately humanistic triumph. _Cold War_ reportedly received a 18-minute standing ovation at Cannes. Here is hoping that both director and actress will find continued success.


(for A.)

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